The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Apparent "Parental Alienation" and the "Chameleon Child"

It would be
silly to claim that no parent ever caused a child to be alienated from and to
reject contact with the other parent. This can be done inadvertently, as when
one parent is afraid of the other and an infant sees this through social
referencing, or it can be done intentionally with the goal of hurting the other
adult. However, it is not silly to consider that the apparent alienation of a
child, with refusal to be with one parent, can have a wide variety of causes.
That range of causes is not so easy to explore, and a parent who feels rejected
may readily assume that any problem is of the other parent’s making.

Benjamin Garber has discussed one possible
situation, in which each parent believes that the child fears and wants to
avoid the other parent. He calls this pattern the “chameleon child” (Garber,
B.D. [2014]. The chameleon child: Children as actors in the high conflict
divorce drama. Journal of Child Custody,
11,25-40). The point of Garber’s discussion is not to blame children, but
to consider that they are not simply passive recipients of parental pressure.
Rather, they actively involve themselves in an uncomfortable situation and
attempt to adapt themselves to the situation, and the situation to themselves. In
pointing this out, Garber follows (without mentioning it) some important
principles of modern developmental psychology. One of these principles is that
the effects of family experiences are not just bidirectional but transactional:
parents and children affect each other, and the ways in which they do this
change over time. The second is that children’s own characteristics can
influence the ways in which experiences affect them. This is most often
discussed in terms of the ways a child’s genetic make-up and her experiences
interact to change developmental outcomes, but it can also be considered with
respect to the ways a child’s needs may evoke responses from caregivers, or the
ways a child may actively seek to get from caregivers what he or she wants; in
either of these cases, the child can also be influenced by the caregivers’
responses.

The “chameleon child”, according to Garber, is one
who tells the father how much the child likes to visit him, and what bad things
the mother does. The same child does the reverse with the mother, praising her
and criticizing the father. For both parents, the child cries and resists going
to the one she is not presently with. Each parent is convinced that the other
parent is mistreating the child and that the child hates and rejects the other
one.

What is going on here? Is the child simply a wicked
little creature who lies and likes to cause trouble? No-- a much simpler and more accurate statement
would be that the child wants both parents and wants to have them together. The
child wants both parents to love him, so he tells each one what that parent
seems to be fascinated by hearing: 1. How much the child likes to be with the
present parent, and 2. What bad things the other parent does. This line of
conversation gets the deep interest and attention of whichever parent is
hearing it at a given time. The child does not imagine that parental conflict
is heightened by the stories told to each parent. On the contrary, he may
imagine that the conflict is just about him, that one or both parents don’t like
him so much and that’s why each is with him for only part of the time, and that
if he can get them to like him more, they will reunite and both be with him all
the time.

What about the parents? Are they trying to cook up
some attack against each other? They may be, but chances are that they, and
their attorneys, and their therapists, are all just suffering from the same
confirmation bias that all of us have to fight. This means that they (and we)
are ready to hear and remember information that supports a way of thinking that
we already have, and ready to ignore or forget anything that confuses us by contradicting
or only partially supporting our existing assumptions. For each one, the
co-parent is a person who is unreliable, or unsympathetic, or sneaky, or cruel
in some way-- if it were not so, they
would not have separated, and that is the opinion of both the “one who left”
and the “one who was left”. That such a person might mistreat a child in some
way seems fairly credible, and anything that supports the idea that
mistreatment has actually happened fits beautifully into confirmation of this assumption. In addition, of course, each of
the parents sees himself or herself as a protector of children, and to find
that someone else treats the child badly and should be stopped is an event that
confirms the bias about the self as well as about the other adult. These biases
are so powerful that most parents do not investigate further or seek other
information to help them decide whether a conclusion is correct—and this may be
true of the attorneys and the therapists as well.

Garber recounts an anecdote that shows how confirmation
bias can not only lead to the wrong conclusion, but can interfere with seeking stronger
evidence about an issue. A four-year-old girl returned from a visit to her
father and announced cheerfully to her mother, “Daddy showed me all about sex!”.
The mother was flabbergasted, but not altogether surprised-- after all, we all know about pedophiles, don’t
we? After a restraining order and much consulting and investigation, it turned
out that the father had taken the girl to a museum with an entomology exhibit.
He showed her all about, not sex, but insects. The child was obviously safe and
happy, but the mother’s confirmation bias prevented her from asking a few
questions about this “sex” business, which might have revealed that butterflies
and moths were the real topic.

That child’s “chameleon” position came to be when
the mother misunderstood or misinterpreted a statement that everyone would
agree to be ambiguous at the very least. But a number of children provide
fodder for their separated parents’ confirmation biases by adapting their
behavior to what a parent seems to want to hear, praising the present parent
and criticizing the absent one. Like real chameleons, the children make
themselves safe and comfortable by doing what the social environment signals
them to do, in ways that are no more antisocial than telling Aunt Lily you like
your birthday present when you actually don’t. We want children to have these
skills of social adaptation. We also want to know if anything bad does happen
to them. For the best outcome, then, we need for co-parents, attorneys, and
therapists to examine their own confirmation biases and seek all the factors
that may determine a child’s attitudes and statements, rather than leaping to
either the parental alienation or the child
abuse conclusions.

2 comments:

http://www.drcachildress.org/asp/admin/getFile.asp?RID=103&TID=6&FN=pdfhere is how Craig Childress describes Dorcy Pruter's "High road of reunification" protocol.He asserts that it is comprised of a series of steps to get from STart A to Goal G, and if the process is interrupted or the steps are not taken in the right order, it is doomed to failure, that's why it requires an intensive 4-day-workshop. The workshop is composed of heart-warming films about families, structured exercises and semi-structured exercises. As far as I understand, the films are the same for each family.As far as I understand, Dorcy Pruter is training non-mental-health professionals to perform her workshop exactly according to her instructutions, and Craig Childress approves of this. He thinks that there are not enough "reunification specialists" (or whatever he wants to call it), and he thinks that no serious training in mental health, education or social work is warranted to conduct those workshops.Dorcy Pruter asserts that there is a 100% success rate for her "High road of reunifcation" workshop, although she does not cite the number of clients she had. She asserts that the success after the intervention depends on the "maintenance care" done by someone else. So she can blame any failure on the other therapist.To me, the very structure of the protocol looks like short-term brainwashing.I heard from youths who were forced to participate in residential programs for "at risk" youth like those proposed by the wwasp network that their program is similar: they also have to watch videos and participate in pseudo-therapeutic group sessions. It might well be that this high road of reunification protocol was inspired by those practices.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.